Practical Screen-craft - 20th October

Tuesday 20th October 2015

Course Module - BAFI101                      Practical Screen-craft                        Lecture - Stu Bailey

Experimenting with Sound

Today we had a tutorial on the sound equipment that can be used with the H4N Zoom microphone such as the boom mic, shotgun mic, omni mics etc. We looked at directional and Omni directional mics and we were able to test out some of the equipment towards the end of the lesson.

Myself and Sam went down to the library, we had the aim to use a really quiet place, people see it as a tranquil space to learn and relax with a book, we found out through the tests that the library sounded much louder through the shotgun mic, which was what we were using. The following is a list of sounds that we captured and what we thought they sounded like, could be used as foley for specific scenarios within film;

Sound Test

Pens/pencils - Writing with chalk on the board, if this was recorded slower or at a lower frequency we thought that it could have sounded like the sea moving.

Brushing the carpet - Sounded like someone using sandpaper on wood.

Walking down the corridor - We got a teacher to walk down the corridor outside our tutorial room, we could really hear the sounds bouncing of the walls down the hallway, lots of reverb. We followed his footsteps with the microphone, as we traveled and brought the microphone closer, the sound started to pull in and the further we got, the more quieter his footsteps sounded.

Flicking through a magazine - Sounded like crisp packets, the fasted that you flicked through, the more it sounded like a fire starting.

Shuffling the DVD boxes - Train going across the tracks

Tapping and dragging our fingers - The repeated tapping started to sound like a gun firing where as the dragging sounded like an aeroplane starting up.